Why Is Rent So High in the Great Recession?

Have you moved in the last five years? One in 10 of us moves each year, but the Great Recession has had a topsy-turvy impact on our residential comings and goings, says a new UCLA study.

Not only did more us move in recent years, but the real estate foreclosure crisis put more people in apartments, and you know what that did?

It put pressure on the cost of leasing. In other words, it raised the rent at a time when we could have used a cheap place to stay.

Michael A. Stoll, chair of public policy at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs, recently studied our Great Recession mobility for the Russell Sage Foundation and came up with some interesting facts.

He says 4 million Americans moved in 2010, which Stoll calls "the height of the Great Recession." (The recession officially ended in 2009, although you could argue 2010 was a shite year for sure.)

In Las Vegas, a city known for its foreclosure disaster, one in five people moved in 2010, the study says.

There was a decline in out-of-state moves: Great Recession migration often happened on a local level, indicating a certain level of desperation, if you ask us. "Americans found fewer opportunities out of state," UCLA says.

Stoll:

... A large fraction of these local moves were characterized by downward economic mobility. People were moving out of homes they owned or to more affordable or less desirable neighborhoods.

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Dennis Romero is an L.A. Weekly staff writer. He formerly worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian and, as a young stringer, the New York Times.